Introducing Fireworks AI on Microsoft Foundry: Bringing high performance, low latency open model inference to Azure

By Dustin Ward

Across industries, organizations are increasingly standardizing on open models to gain greater control over performance, cost, customization, and the security and compliance required for enterprise deployment. Open models give teams the flexibility to choose the right architecture for each workload and avoid lock‑in to a single model provider as their needs evolve. Explore models on…

Unpacking your top questions on agentic AI: The Shift podcast

By Dustin Ward

Every day in the hallways at Microsoft, I hear product teams discussing where agents are headed and how software is forever changed. Many of us come into the office more now, and I didn’t realize how much I missed the in-between moments where natural chat gives us energy—coffee and hot takes on the way to…

Introducing GPT-5.4 in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Built for Reliable AI Production: Stronger reasoning, dependable execution, and agentic workflows at scaleToday, we’re announcing OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 to be generally available soon in Microsoft Foundry: a model designed to help organizations move from planning work to reliably completing it in production environments. As AI agents are applied to longer, more complex workflows; consistency and…

Unlocking document understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms – remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights. Enter mistral-document-ai-2512 in Microsoft Foundry. This new…

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud adds governance, productivity, and support for large AI models securely running even when completely disconnected

By Dustin Ward

As digital sovereignty becomes a strategic requirement, organizations are rethinking how they deploy critical infrastructure and AI capabilities under tighter regulatory expectations and higher risk conditions. Microsoft’s approach to sovereignty is grounded in enabling enterprises, public sectors, and regulated industries to participate in the digital economy securely, independently, and on their own terms. The Microsoft…